In this tutorial you'll learn how to maximize the brightness and contrast of your video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 using the Brightness, Contrast, and Gamma Correction controls for effective and balanced adjustments.

In this tutorial you'll learn how to maximize the brightness and contrast of your video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. We'll be working with video I recently shot of Democratic congressional candidate Anthony Flaccavento. I shot it indoors under fluorescent light. And while the color balance is fine (as you can see in Figure 1, below), and the white to the speaker's right is white, the video is a bit dingy, and you might say it lacks contrast. It's also noisy, which is a problem we'll deal with in a later tutorial.

Figure 1. The source video is dingy and lacking in contrast.

The Color Correction Workspace

When I'm adjusting the color or brightness in a video in Premiere Pro, I like to edit in the Color Correction workspace. To get there, you click Window > Workspace, and select Color Correction (Figure 2, below).

I've customized my workspace, so it might look a bit different from yours, but the main pieces you see in Figure 3 (below) will be showing: The Waveform Monitor in the center, the Effect Controls on the left, the Timeline below, and the video in the Program Monitor on the right.

Figure 3. The Color Correction Workspace

Note that the reference monitor has many alternate views that you can access byclicking the flyout panel (Figure 4, below). For example, you can click to select Composite Video or Alpha View.

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